It is the eve of the release of Victoria Canal’s much-anticipated debut album, Slowly, It Dawns, and the singer/songwriter is just getting off the ski slopes in Seattle. This is not where Canal is supposed to be. A week prior she was scheduled to be the musical guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live! That appearance, and everything else Canal was doing in Los Angeles was cancelled due to the wildfires that ripped through the city. Canal evacuated for health reasons.
She’s wearing a backwards baseball cap with the adjustment strap sticking out. Her face is ruddy from the cold, and she is glowing. As she returns her skis, I could imagine myself striking up a conversation with her in the queue. She’s got a big smile and an approachable demeanor. This comes through on her active social media where the connection she has with her followers is tangible.
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Through her posts are where Stevie Wonder and Chris Martin found her, albeit in a roundabout way. She met Wonder when she was 15 after posting a cover of “Isn’t She Lovely” on Facebook—one of her earliest posts. When Wonder put out his hand for a shake, she offered him her partial right arm, surprising him. He loved it and encouraged her to keep going. I don’t bring up her disability, but she does, pretty quickly. Canal has amniotic band syndrome, which means she was born without her right forearm. Another post caught Martin’s attention in 2021, which led to Canal getting signed to the same label as Coldplay. Martin invited her to play “Paradise” with them at Glastonbury in 2024. Canal’s voice is heard many times on Coldplay’s 2024 studio LP, Moon Music. Tom Cruise sent her one of his famous coconut cakes last holiday season.
The 26-year-old Canal has been preparing for these moments for the last decade. Born in Munich to a Spanish father and an American mother, Canal has lived in Madrid, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Dubai. Her musical inclination was encouraged by her family, especially her grandmother who, every time Canal practiced piano when she was visiting would say, “Con alma.” Says Canal, “She would never let me stop practicing until she believed what I was playing. That really stayed with me.”
Canal has released three EPs Victoria (2020), Elegy (2022), and Well Well (2023). She collected the Ivor Novello Rising Star award in 2023 and Best Song Musically and Lyrically for “Black Swan” in 2024. She was the central figure on the Apple TV+ episode of Little America titled “The Indoor Arm” in 2022. She collaborated with Nike on their Fearless Ones campaign and her song “Drama” was used to promote their Jordan FlyEase shoe, designed for athletes with disabilities.
This buildup has led to Slowly, It Dawns on which Canal worked with Eg White (Sam Smith) and Tony Berg (Phoebe Bridgers), recording between her two adopted hometowns of London and Los Angeles. Lyrically relatable and sonically powerful, it’s the Victoria we all knew she could be. She Zooms on her phone to talk to SPIN about Slowly, It Dawns. The camera angles are skewed but it’s kind of fun, like being a fly on her clothing and looking up at her.
SPIN: I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve listened to “Hollow.” It’s my favorite song on the album. It gives me goosebumps every single time.
Victoria Canal: Oh my gosh! Really? It’s my favorite too. I really believe in that song. I had written “Hollow” while staying at my friend’s place in London. He had some books on his shelf. I stitched together a sentence from the titles and that ended up being in the chorus. It was a Joni Mitchell book, a Joan Didion, a Patti Smith, and the Bible, all in a row. It created the lines: “There’s no morning glory/No bible or moral of the story/To follow, beneath it all we are hollow.” I’m reading [Didion’s] Slouching Toward Bethlehem at the moment.
One of my other favorite songs is “Totally Fucking Fine.” I wrote it when I had strep throat and I couldn’t sing. My experiment was, “Can I write a song start to finish without knowing what it would sound like?” I didn’t sing it until I was in the studio. What you hear is the first and only take of that song, then we overlaid a harpist and a clarinet player and stuff. Where my soul lives is in all those non-singles.
Do you ever intentionally limit yourself?
One of the things I find most interesting in music is restraint and limitation. I’m so glad that I was totally uninhibited with my collaborations and leaning into the pop stuff and the summer stuff, but on some of the Eg White stuff, I didn’t play everything. The fact that I was born with my disability has really informed how I play instruments. It makes it unique to me. Going forward, I am going to be a little more stubborn about playing the instruments on my records. Inherently, because of my limitations, it sounds more like me.
Were you thinking about a theme or concept when you were working on the album?
I conceptually put it together afterwards. My big idea with the formatting of the album is the first six songs are the first side. They’re very brash and naïve and young. “15%” and “Vauxhall” are the first ones that have any self-reflection or self-awareness. From there the album evolves into a slightly more mature, wounded, and wiser person. The title, Slowly, It Dawns is emblematic of the way that, as you get older, you realize more about what it means to be alive, the complexity and the darkness and the light. I was interested in the arc starting out overconfident and naïve, and growing into wisdom. The album is chaotic in many ways, but that’s what it feels like to be in my 20s and trying to figure it out.
You’ve been journaling for years and your lyrics feel like reading your journal. What is the difference between your journaling and songwriting?
My journaling is definitely my most uninhibited, crude, unfiltered place where I put my thoughts. The goal is for my songs to be as close to what I would put in a journal as possible. As a songwriter, one of the things that really piques my interest, especially when I listen to other artists is, what are they saying that people don’t normally say out loud? Whether it be something doing with body image or being sexual or grief or comparison. In that way, my journaling and songwriting are very aligned.
But I also see my journaling process as the constant. There’s no outcome. Having music be my profession, part of the tragic loss in it is that it will always be a means to an end. I make music with the ambition that it will turn into something that people will like. Journaling, no one ever has to like. No one will ever even know. Ironically, some of the best music that I’ve made has been when I think no one will ever hear it. “Swan Song” I wrote thinking no one would ever hear that song, convinced that it was just for me and it’s my most-streamed song. It’s wild. I love collaborating, but I’m feeling a real craving to have my music sound like my journal again.
It feels like this moment in time is tailor-made for you.
As big as I dreamed as a kid: Grammys, late night TV, I never actually thought that a late night show would allow or encourage someone with a disability like mine to be on that stage as an artist. Not as a tokenized thing, but like a featured musical guest. It’s not lost on me that I get to be one of the first people to do it with a limb difference. I haven’t seen that on late night. If there has been the opportunity, it’s been because of that artist’s or person’s difference.
For me, it’s despite, or regardless of that. Part of the big conversation that my manager and I had when we first started working together was, I am not ashamed of my disability, but it’s not the most interesting thing about me. It’s not my gimmick. I don’t want to use it to get my foot in the door. I’m also not trying to hide it. The amount of interviews I’ve done that have tastelessly asked questions that are super insensitive, or written things that are super insensitive, so much of that has changed. Part of the reason that it’s changed is because I keep talking about it, saying, this is frustrating. There is such a difference to being Victoria Canal on Kimmel than it is to be “one-armed piano player with Chris Martin.” I’m just coming to the realization that sometimes being spoken about publicly will be reductive, and that’s just something an artist has to accept. But I still want to fight for the language I think people with disabilities deserve.
You are breaking new ground for artists with disabilities, a difficult task considering there wasn’t representation for you to look to.
My parents, but especially my Cuban grandma were always of the mindset that whatever you put your mind to, you can do it. They were so adamant about messaging that to me when I was very little. That was very formative. I’m so glad they did that, because moving through the world, a lot of people want to come to my rescue. While accepting help is a very healthy thing, I think sometimes, especially for people with disabilities, it’s a dangerously thin line to not believing in your own capabilities anymore or not building up the confidence that you are capable. My dad was very defensive and protective towards me when it came to people pitying me. He was like, “There’s no room for pity in this family. She’ll figure it out.” It’s the reason I thought I could play an instrument. My mom was the one that made me play piano with both extremities, my hand and my little arm. I have my family to thank for that early confidence.
Is that confidence carrying through to now?
I’m a lot less confident and arrogant now than when I was 15 and thought the whole world belongs to me. I have been humbled in new ways, but that’s healthy. The thing that gives me confidence these days is focusing on how I make other people feel. Being kind, being interested, focusing on connection and being curious, those things give me so much more confidence about who I am than how much talent I have compared to the next person.
It feels like the album reflects that.
I know. It’s pretty fucking meta. The music talks about regretting certain choices or outfits or things I’ve said, but how that informs me going forward, and what really matters, how to redefine success and what I really want from my life.
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